Johnston Birchall

Decentralising public service management

Introduction Theories and Concepts Reform Doctrines Roads to Freedom? Decentralised Management of NHS Trusts Decentralised Management of Secondary Schools Decentralised Management of Socially Rented Housing Freedom, Performance and Accountability Research Design and Methodology

THE CO-OPERATIVE REFORM PROCESS IN TANZANIA AND SRI LANKA

This article reports on findings from a three year study of co-operatives in Sri Lanka and Tanzania. The article asks three questions: why do co-operative sectors need reforming; what is the co-operative reform process; and why has reform succeeded in some countries but not others? It provides a short history of co-operatives in three phases: the colonial period, the post-colonial nationalist period and the period of market liberalisation. It shows that the control exercised by colonial governments was deepened under nationalist governments, with co-operatives becoming parastatals. Liberalisation brought a sustained attempt by international agencies to reassert the distinctive nature of co-operatives as member-owned businesses. However, co-ops were ill-prepared to adjust to a competitive market and the lifting of government regulation; many failed, some were corrupted, while a few became truly member-controlled. The article draws on documentary analysis and key informant interviews to provide accounts of the reform process in Tanzania and Sri Lanka. It finds that the process is incomplete and often contested. Copyright

The Comparative Advantages of Member-owned Businesses

Abstract This article provides a systematic descriptive and analytical framework for understanding the comparative advantages of member-owned businesses (MOBs) such as cooperatives, mutuals, and economic associations. First, it provides a short description of two main ownership types—consumer and producer—then it provides a taxonomy of all the main sub-types. An overview of the literature on comparative advantage follows. The three elements of ownership, control, and benefit are identified, and then advantages arising from these elements are identified and discussed with historical examples and empirical evidence derived mainly from the authors previous work. There is a brief discussion of the wider advantages to society in general from the presence of an MOB sector. A section on disadvantages identifies problems such as difficulty in raising capital, and governance failure due to lack of member participation. The final section considers the comparative nature of advantage, comparing MOBs with other ownership types, and making a distinction between comparative advantage and competitive advantage under particular market conditions.

Some Theoretical and Practical Implications of the Attempted Takeover of a Consumer Cooperative Society

The article begins with some observations about the trend towards demutualization of mutual and co-operative businesses, and then presents a case study of one, rather dramatic, example: the attempted takeover of Europes largest consumer co-operative, CWS. It draws on original research into the takeover bid to provide a summary of what happened and when, and then asks some important questions about whether consumer co-operatives are inherently less efficient than PLCs in the retail sector; whether they can make themselves safe from takeover; if they do survive, how they can justify their existence as member-owned businesses; and whether there are alternative forms such as worker or multi-stakeholder ownership that can achieve the broad aims of the co-operative sector more effectively. It concludes that if CWS and similar organizations are to survive they must integrate the two aspects of a co-operative - the business and the association - and take seriously the opportunities and responsibilities that being a member-owned organization implies.

Letting Managers Manage: Decentralisation and Opting Out

This chapter examines the experience of opting out in health, education and housing services. After an initial discussion of the issues raised by opting out and the context in which it took place the chapter addresses a series of questions about the impact of opting out. Did it increase management freedom? What impact was there on accountability? Did the performance of the organisations improve?

People-Centred Businesses

The purpose of this book is to explain why that highly-paid and experienced executive missed such an obvious point about his own company, and to evaluate the importance of the point he had missed. There is a whole class of business organisation that is owned not by investors, or the public, or a particular entrepreneur, but by those who benefit directly from its activities: end-users or customers, other companies who supply to or are supplied by the business, or its employees. This is, to put it simply, a member-owned business, and it is quite distinct from an investor-owned business.

Finance in an Age of Austerity

This is a book in search of an alternative to the discredited investor-owned banks that have brought the rich countries into crisis and the world economy into a long period of austerity. It finds customer-owned banks – credit unions, co-operative banks, building societies – have hardly been affected by the crisis and continue to operate according to their organisational DNA: low-risk, close to the customer, underpinned by real savings, and still lending to SMEs to protect jobs and local economies. They are big business – in some countries with over 40% of the market – but networked in smaller, democratic societies whose origins go back to 1850s Germany.

Decentralization in an Inter-Governmental Context: The UK Experience of Managing Local Service Delivery

This chapter is not intended to provide either a definitive description of changes in the management of local services, nor an exhaustive analysis of those changes. Instead, its principal aim is quickly to review the findings of a large fieldwork research project in health care, education and public housing in order to pick out the major trends in decentralization and devolution between the various levels of government. These trends will then be interrogated against the following questions: a. How can we best describe the broad pattern of decentralization, devolution and countervailing centralization that has taken place? b. What evidence is there of the effect of the latter reforms on the productivity and quality of the services in question? c. What have been the implications of these changes for the overall pattern of public accountability within the UK system of government?

The Role and Potential of Co-Operatives in the Poverty Reduction Process

Since the ex-colonial countries gained their freedom, there has been a constant search for a development ‘magic formula’ of sustained economic growth with poverty reduction. A recent emphasis has been on group-based lending to poor people (in particular to women) in the expectation that this would enable them to trade their way out of poverty. However, problems with the sustainability of NGO-led lending, within the context of the World Bank’s emphasis on the need for financial deepening (2007), have led to a renewed interest in savings and credit co-operatives. The Bank’s World Development Report 2008 shifts the emphasis to improving the output of rural economies, the organisational vehicle for which is recognised to be a farmers’ association. In both cases, the solution being proposed is some kind of co-operative. Co-operatives operate according to principles established by the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844 and updated by the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) in 1995. The ICA defines a co-operative as: An autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations, through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise (1995).

Theorising the Rise and Fall of Member-owned Businesses

Organisations are difficult to understand. They are comprised of people yet they survive even when the people within them change. They are a collective endeavour but in legal terms have the status of an individual ‘person’. Metaphors such as a machine or an organism are both useful depending on what aspects of an organisation we want to see, but no one metaphor seems to capture it all. We need to be able to look at it in different ways; it has hard features such as structures and systems, soft features such as shared norms and values, overt features such as organisational charts and hidden features such as habits and routines. If we are to understand MOBs, we need to look at internal processes such as the relationships that exist between owners, managers and board members that determine their governance. We need to look at external processes such as the networks that exist between MOBs, or the regulatory environment a particular type of MOB finds itself in.